A recent lawsuit filed in Missouri over child molestation and abuse charges against a Catholic monastery there contains allegations which, if proved, raise troubling questions about the conduct of ECUSA’s Presiding Bishop when she was the Bishop of Nevada from 2000 until her election to the national post in 2006. The lawsuit alleges that one of the abbey’s Benedictine monks, Bede Parry, molested the plaintiff and several other young men over a five-year period between 1982 and 1987 while they sang in the Abbey Choir, of which Parry was the director….When the facts of the abuse came out in 1987, Parry left the monastery for a course of treatment, and then used his position as a Catholic priest to work at a variety of Catholic and Lutheran parishes in the southwest.
In 2000, Parry apparently applied to join another Catholic monastery, and underwent psychological testing and evaluation. “The results of this testing revealed that Fr. Parry was a sexual abuser who had the proclivity to reoffend with minors,” the lawsuit alleges. Instead of joining the monastery, Parry was hired as the music director at All Saints Episcopal Church, in Las Vegas, where Jefferts Schori was the diocesan. (She did not need to be consulted about his hiring, and Parry now says that he did not disclose the test results to the clergy at All Saints.)
The time line of the abuse was not from 1982-1987 but was as follows: (From the suit)
“20. The Abbey knew that Fr. Parry had sexually abused other students prior to Fr. Parry’s sexual abuse of the Plaintiff. Between 1973 and 1979, while Bede Parry was a monk at the Abbey, but before Bede Parry was an ordained priest, Bede Parry reported to Abbot Hanus that he had been involved in three inappropriate sexual relationships. In 1981, Bede Pany, while attending classes at St. John’s School of Theology in Collegeville, Minnesota, had sexual contact with a St. John’s student. Bede Pany admitted to the sexual misconduct to both St. John’s Abbot aJ
Jerome Theisen and two other monks at St. John’s as well as Abbot Hanus at the Abbey. Bede Pary was allowed to remain at St. John’s until he graduated in 1982 but at the insistence of Abbot Hanus and as a condition of remaining at St. John’s, Bede Parry was required to receive psychological treatment.